2

No caravan this time. Where shall I stay?

A potholed lane, a farm shed smelling of dung, a tall white house. A ship's bell hangs on a rope at the door. Clangalang!

Jane, plump, a bit short of breath (she's asthmatic), answers the bell. She and her husband Ian run their home, Comar Lodge, as a bed and breakfast and, yes, there's a bed for the night. This tower-like house at the end of a farm track was built in the 1700s. The stones in the porch wall are scored where Jacobite soldiers sharpened their dirks in the Forty-five rising.

From my room at the top, there's a view of meadow and riverbank where sometimes, says Ian, you will see an osprey fishing. Between twin beds, a cabinet opens to reveal a chamber pot decorated with green flowers, chipped on the rim. There's an old-fashioned dressing table which will do for a desk though the mirrors are off-putting. In a cupboard under the eaves are a bottle or two of wine but they're probably not meant for guests. Just stored.

Down the road in Cannich village is the Slater's Arms, where Jimmac stands behind the bar. Jimmac, a gruff burly man, was a slater until he came down from the rooftops to pull pints. Business is brisk. I meet Mike, a freelance trucker taking a fortnight off from the road, who says he's trying to get fit with a bit of biking, a bit of walking and maybe some fishing. (You get fit fishing?) Also he's reconnoitring Strathglass to see if he can settle here and make a home. He lives in Dunfermline.

The king sits in Dunfermline toun

Drinking the bluid-red wine

Across the road is the Glen Affric Hotel. No, the Glen Affric Hot-l – an ‘e’ has dropped off.

Dimmed are the bright lights of yore. All's dark in the hotel except for a chink of light under a door. Inside the poky bar, silent, bare, uncarpeted, a solitary customer sits at a plain table with a pint in front of him, talking to a young (youngish) woman behind the tiny corner bar. She has dark hair with a hint of auburn in it. On the wall behind her is a gantry holding only three upturned bottles, though there's space for five.

I ask for a malt whisky. There's no malt. She answers cheerily, ‘You can have Whyte and Mackay or Whyte and Mackay or Whyte and Mackay.’ Three bottles. No malt, but it will serve.

Louise smiles at adversity.

Frank, her customer, runs a fire station in Birmingham and spends his two weeks off in eight in a cottage he bought just out of Cannich. He tells me of his 90-year-old neighbour, Old Duncan. ‘You should speak to him. He's got lots of stories about the old days. He's writing a book about it.’

In comes Brian, a young Jamaican. Brian Chisholm – he's researching his roots in Affric, which is Chisholm country. What will he find? A Chisholm from Affric who came to the sugar island as a planter? A slave girl as his several-greats-grandmother?

Brian, while here, has set up an art gallery in a wing of the hotel where the dining room was. The room has been stripped and is eerie. Two bare bulbs cast a pale glow in the barn-like interior, which smells of damp. On the walls hangs an eclectic (to be polite) mix of pictures in different sizes and styles, most of them gaudy. But in one corner is something special, a small group of icons, as in an Orthodox church – meek virgins, adoring saints, babes wise beyond their years, all crowned in golden glories. Inclined heads, tapered fingers, arcane meanings. Not sentimental images for the tourists but the real thing, made by a nun who lives in Cannich.

Icons in Affric! Wonder of wonders.

In the garden seen from the bedroom window at Comar is a summer house, a gazebo with a table and weathered seats inside – a place to work, maybe, when the weather's warm. Beyond the fence there's a field dotted with browsing sheep, then a line of bare trees with a glimpse of the river, broad and rippling, and a ridge of forested hill hazy in the weak March sunshine.

Breakfast is set on the big table in a room furnished with antique oriental pieces. Ian was brought up in India, where his father was a planter. It's part dining room, part kitchen. Ian speaks from the Aga.

I ask about the icons. ‘Sister Petra Clare,’ says Ian. He says she's renowned far and wide for her work and gets orders for icons from across continents.

Sister Petra Clare lives at Marydale, the Catholic church in the pine trees across the road from the Cannich caravan park, where she offers a retreat to the faithful which Ian describes as ‘gently commercial’. She may be seen walking down the street with hiking boots under her ample skirts.

(Some days later I do see her in the street – a large lady in flowing white from head to toe. Below her skirts, she's wearing – this I notice – thick socks and heavy shoes, not hiking boots this day. She proceeds in a stately fashion past the shop, billowing like a ship under sail. Should I say hello? But the moment is lost. She walks on with a wan smile on her pale face.)

As for the hotel, Ian thinks it's a hopeless case and it probably never made money, except for a brief interlude when the dams were building. Between the wars when it was a modest country hotel, it was favoured by the gentry who came to fish for salmon or trout or stalk the red deer. They dressed for dinner.

In those days as a simple country hotel, an unpretentious two-storey stone-built affair with an inviting air, it had a welcome for travellers. Then it got beyond itself. At the height of the dam-building boom, a wing was added in a 1930s ocean-liner style with a rounded facade and large metal-framed windows, brightly washed in white or cream. It was a mistake – the good times would never last.

Ian says Louise bought it on an impulse. She inherited money, arrived in Strathglass and fell in love with it and that was that. Gradually the paint began to peel, the window frames rusted and the hotel decayed.

I tell Ian that when Catherine and I spent a night at the Glen Affric Hotel years ago on the eve of our trek through Affric and Kintail it was a welcoming place, with lively company at the bar and in the dining room. There was warmth and chatter. We saw it at its best and remember it fondly.